Three new essays on XML.com today:

On a lark, I searched for other things that people consider harmful. They include goto statements, inheritance, fragmentation, code protection, spam, spam control, killfiles, address munging, reply-to munging, forgiving browsers, Character Set, Mailman, HTTP 1.0 logs, protected pages, firewalls, nonlocality, WWW royalties, use cases, human task switches, incentive pay, Flash, lists with “current”, recursive make, the W* Effect, layered multiplexing, fallback MX, unlocking GDHandles, CSocket, telephone switches, code of points, Moore’s Law, geek culture, monoculture, stealing, formality, deception, Debian, Linux, Python, types, casts, values, nulls, each, if, weblogging, weblogging, web-based editing, LibraryLookup, RealPlayer, Internet Explorer, tabbed browsing, file extensions in URLs, SQL strings, DejaNews, current parsing techniques in software renovation, bandwagons, web-based RPCs, FONT FACE, J2EE, NFS, APIs, FO, XSL, SSL, CSH, OO, IDs, URLs, GPL, CSS, XHTML 2, Dave Winer, and Considered Harmful essays.

Also, embedded markup, in an XML.com article by Ted Nelson (yes, that Ted Nelson), from 1997. Except that back then, Ted was using the term embedded markup to refer to any markup embedded in the same document as the text. You know, like XML does. (Ted recommends parallel markup, where the text is kept pure and a parallel document is kept in sync that adds markup definitions pointing to specific character offsets.) Six years later, embedded markup has obviously won, and what Norm is really arguing against is embedding markup within embedded markup. Perhaps the things we consider harmful say more about us than they do about them.

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Thirty nine comments here (latest comments)

  1. The inheritance link above for ‘considered harmful’ is in fact in support of inheritance. The original essay on how “inheritance is evil” can be found at: http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/e-lang/1998-October/002044.html

    — Anonymous #

  2. Did it take you a year to link to all of those results? Ugh. Hand-linking to huge numbers of links is the worst job in the world, I think. I’d rather be flipping burgers.

    — Dave Bug #

  3. What’s with the new categories, Mark? So far, we have:

    “Those that are included in this classification (25)
    Those that have just broken a flower vase (5)
    Those that resemble flies from a distance (119)
    Those that tremble as if they were mad (51)”

    Is this some classical reference I’ve missed entirely, or just larking about?

    — Danny #

  4. Sweet!

    — zeldman #

  5. “Prosperity is just around the corner” — wow, I so didn’t say that. I just now take a slightly less skeptical line against the realization of the Semantic Web than I did before OWL went to CR. I actually still think the odds are less than 50-50 on the SW happening. But before I thought they were less than 1 in 10.

    So much for (my attempts at) nuance.

    — Kendall #

  6. Danny: your guess of “classical reference” is spot-on. See http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/08/classification

    — James Kew #

  7. Kendall: don’t take it personally. Nuance tends get lost in the link-quote-comment form. Although now I’m glad I didn’t use the comment I was originally going to use: “Hide the children.”

    — Mark #

  8. Not to mention the “back button” (in IE, in some circumstances).

    http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/04/17/back_button_considered_harmful

    Found from this search. ;-)

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22mark+pilgrim%22+%22considered+harmful%22&spell=1

    — Michael #

  9. There’s call-with-current-continuation (call/cc): “It’s like having a nuclear bomb in your garage.”

    http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CallWithCurrentContinuation
    http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ConsideredHarmful

    Personally, I like the idea of a nuke in my garage. Let’s see if the neighbors let their dogs crap on my lawn then!

    — Gordon Weakliem #

  10. Quarter Life Crisis (trackback)

  11. –Nuance tends get lost in the link-quote-comment form.–

    Ah, so blame the medium when you get caught being unfair to someone. So you hate the game AND the playa! :>

    — Kendall #

  12. Coming soon: “Taunting your editor considered harmful”…

    — Mark #

  13. Burningbird (trackback)

  14. –Coming soon: “Taunting your editor considered harmful”…–

    Good one! Remember the ol’ SNL gag: “Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball!”?

    By the way, you should add “u” to your MT config list of allowable HTML bits for comments. Surely it’s not x-site scripting dangerous?

    — Kendall #

  15. Among Other Things (trackback)

  16. I’m mad at Sam Ruby too. I’m also mad at the horrible people that came up with the name “ATOM”. Don’t they know Atom means “the bomb”. If an atom bomb goes off lots and lots of birds and wildlife will die. I’m working on a plan to distribute free Rocky Road ice crean to the entire African continent and the prisioners at Gitmo bay Cuba. I can’t be expected to distribute ice cream to Africa and also fight this whole Atom agenda. I’m going to start a rally. Wow….you should see this sweet little butterfly sitting on one of my flowers. There’s a gentle breeze blowing his tiny little wings and making them flutter ever so slightly. Can you believe all the hormones they’re putting in milk these days? The milk industry is all about money.

    Best Regards… I’m so mad!
    But not at the butterfly.

    — birdburn #

  17. I am most likely in error, but I’m making an educated guess that ‘birdburn’ is specifically making a comment of me and my posting that is attached to this document through trackback. I could be wrong.

    This is not uncommon practice when people choose to make mockery of the effort and the background and the ability of the person rather than address specifically the statements.

    But then again, this may not be about me and I may just be paranoid. I’ll accept that.

    — Shelley #

  18. Wow, that was so weird I may have to make a whole new policy for it…

    — Mark #

  19. Punkey (trackback)
  20. Library Autonomous Zone (trackback)

  21. Kendall - the <u> tag is deprecated and would thus invalidate Mark’s HTML 4.01 Strict template.

    — Evan #

  22. An Oasis (trackback)
  23. Binary By Accident (trackback)

  24. Kendall, I don’t allow any HTML in comments. Known acronyms will be marked up, although not necessarily the way you expect, which can lead to unintentional irony. Double-dashes surrounded by spaces will be converted to ndash, or possibly mdash, I forget which. Apostrophes will be converted into curly apostrophes in almost every standard case; however, straight quotes will *not* be converted to curly quotes, despite the availability of free, popular, robust tools to do exactly this. Nor will syntax such as *this* be converted into any sort of markup whatsoever, despite the availability of free, popular, robust tools to do exactly that.

    Ampersands will be passed through unescaped, thus allowing visitors to invalidate pages at will. Links will be converted to URLs, but badly. Trottliness may be next to godliness, but Ben has never read section 3.3 of RFC 2396.

    Also, you can use an undocumented list of textual emoticons and they will be converted into graphical smilies. But not the one you used; that’s just weird.

    I hope this answers your question. I’ve been meaning to find a way to express all this succinctly in the comment form, but all attempts to simultaneously achieve brevity and clarity have failed. Perhaps if I expressed it in RDF…

    — Mark #

  25. [ S K A I H I G H ] (trackback)

  26. Comments considered harmful? :)

    — Anne van Kesteren #

  27. Why not go the whole hog? Internet considered harmful.

    — Hester #

  28. 2lmc spool (trackback)

  29. Internet considered harmful: Already been covered: http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/006953.php

    — Jay Allen #

  30. Red meats not harmful. Blue green meat, now that is harmful…Tommy Smothers

    — Alex #

  31. #27 > Stuff the Internet. I would imagine that the ultimate would be “Sentient thought considered harmful,” but Google couldn’t find that phrase. :P

    How about this one: http://www.considered-harmful.org/

    Just about sums it up. :)

    — Conan #

  32. Holy cow, you’re much more thorough than I was in http://www.katie-and-rob.org/blog/archives/00000072.html

    — katie #

  33. LOL, I like this one: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html :D

    — Conan #

  34. the Limey Brit (trackback)

  35. Geez… I read through some of those essays. Some people should do their homework before writing an article about something being harmful. One of those articles was written by a guy (let’s be kind and not mention articles or names)who said what he considered harmful he’d only been exposed to for a week… um… and it was about something that’s been around for 6+ years… am I missing something?

    By the way… this comment is considered harmful.

    — Jai #

  36. Never Give Up (trackback)

  37. I think birdburn has a great idea. Perhaps we can configure an RSS feed to update the Africans on the status of their ice cream delivery. Then the can RSS us back on how they liked it. Then, if the RSS works we can RSS our RSS to RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS…….

    Best RegaRssssssRssssRssssRsss….

    Evad Reniw

    — Evad Reniw #

  38. Montpetit.net - fr (trackback)
  39. the iCite net development blog (trackback)

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